Hazzard posted:

The Italians set up something similar in 1917. Arditi stormed trenches primarily with knives and grenades, given covering fire by LMGs. Apparently they took "significant" casualties in the year they were in service and would have experienced complete turnover if they had lasted for three years.

Then some of them took part in the occupation of Fiume and created the blackshirt uniform the Fascists created later on.

Their knife fighting is interesting, because it's left arm forward, with the assumption your opponent with go for it and probably hit, so you use your right hand, dagger in an ice pick grip to go for their vitals.

At Fightcamp I got to take part in melee fighting and trench raiding. In trench raiding I killed two people! Stabbed one and then tripped when struck with a bayonet, so I punched someone with the basket of my dagger as I fell.

Melee fighting was enlightening. It's now quite easy to understand how one unit can flank another, quite easily. And the unit will struggle to turn around to meet the threat.

Don Gato posted:

France is just a bunch of Germanic tribes going around and saying "How do you do, fellow Romance languages?", so that obviously means France and Germany are the same

It's probably bullshit, but I've heard anecdotes that Gurkha soldiers in WWI had a habit of waiting in their trenches with kukris drawn to gut anyone who got too close instead of popping their heads up to possibly get shot/have to leave the relative safety of the trench. Then again, I've read some of the VC citations that Gurkhas have earned in Afghanistan so I pretty much believe every story involving them.

quote:

On the evening of the day in question [17 September 2010], Sergeant Pun was one of four men left in the southern compound because the platoon had pushed out a patrol to dominate the road to the east in readiness for the next day’s parliamentary elections. All were taking turns to man a single sangar position on the roof in the centre of the compound.
Sergeant Pun was on duty when he heard a clinking noise to the south of the checkpoint:

“I thought at first maybe it was a cow," he said, "but my suspicions soon built up, and I saw Taliban digging to lay down an IED in front of our gate.”

Sergeant Pun had the presence of mind to gather up two radios, which would enable him to both speak to his commander and to call in artillery support, his personal weapon, and a general purpose machine gun.

Realising that he was about to be attacked, he quickly informed his commander on one of the radios, and launched a grenade at the enemy. Sergeant Pun single-handedly fought off an enemy attack on his lightly manned position. In the dark he tackled the enemy head on as he moved around his position to fend off the attack from three sides, killing three assailants and causing the others to flee.

In doing so he saved the lives of his three comrades and prevented the position from being overrun. Sergeant Pun couldn’t know how many Taliban were attempting to overcome his position, but he sought them out from all angles despite the danger, consistently moving towards them to reach the best position of attack:

“I thought there might have been around 20 to 30, but later locals told me it was probably about 15. The firing went on continually for about 17 minutes,” said Sergeant Pun.

“At first I was a bit scared, and I thought definitely they are going to kill me. But as soon as I started firing, that feeling went away.”

quote:

War Office, 9th November, 1944

The KING has been graciously pleased to approve the award of the VICTORIA CROSS to:-

No. 10119 Rifleman Tulbahadur [sic] Pun, 6th Gurkha Rifles, Indian Army.

In Burma on 23 June 1944, a Battalion of the 6th Gurkha Rifles was ordered to attack the Railway Bridge at Mogaung. Immediately the attack developed the enemy opened concentrated and sustained cross fire at close range from a position known as the Red House and from a strong bunker position two hundred yards to the left of it.

The cross fire was so intense that both the leading platoons of 'B' Company, one of which was Rifleman Tulbahadur Pun's, were pinned to the ground and the whole of his Section was wiped out with the exception of himself, the Section commander and one other man. The Section commander immediately led the remaining two men in a charge on the Red House but was at once badly wounded. Rifleman Tulbahadur (sic) Pun and his remaining companion continued the charge, but the latter too was immediately wounded.

Rifleman Tulbahadur Pun then seized the Bren Gun, and firing from the hip as he went, continued the charge on this heavily bunkered position alone, in the face of the most shattering concentration of automatic fire, directed straight at him. With the dawn coming up behind him, he presented a perfect target to the Japanese. He had to move for thirty yards over open ground, ankle deep in mud, through shell holes and over fallen trees.

Despite these overwhelming odds, he reached the Red House and closed with the Japanese occupants. He killed three and put five more to flight and captured two light machine guns and much ammunition. He then gave accurate supporting fire from the bunker to the remainder of his platoon which enabled them to reach their objective.

His outstanding courage and superb gallantry in the face of odds which meant almost certain death were most inspiring to all ranks and beyond praise.

Disinterested posted:

Disinterested posted:

Didn't even get a VC.

Don Gato posted:

So was this just due to institutionalized racism? It looks really similar to Senator Daniel Inouye's Medal of Honor, which was a Distinguished Service Cross until Bill Clinton re-evaluated it to a Medal of Honor in 2000.

quote:

On 21st November 1965 in the Bau District of Sarawak Lance Corporal RAMBAHADUR LIMBU was with his Company when they discovered and attacked a strong enemy force located in the Border area... Leading his support group in the van of the attack he could see the nearest trench and in it a sentry manning a machine gun. Determined to gain first blood he inched himself forward until... he was seen and the sentry opened fire, immediately wounding a man to his right. Rushing forward he reached the enemy trench... and killed the sentry, thereby gaining for the attacking force a foothold on the objective... with a complete disregard for the hail of fire he got together and led his fire group to a better fire position...

...he saw both men of his own group seriously wounded... and... immediately commenced... to rescue his comrades... he crawled forward, in full view of at least two enemy machine gun posts who concentrated their fire on him... but... was driven back by the accurate and intense... fire... After a pause he started again...

Rushing forward he hurled himself on the ground beside one of the wounded and calling for support from two light machine guns... he picked up the man and carried him to safety... Without hesitation he immediately returned... [for the other] wounded man [and] carried him back... through the hail of enemy bullets. It had taken twenty minutes to complete this gallant action and the events leading up to it. For all but a few seconds this Non-Commissioned Officer had been moving alone in full view of the enemy and under the continuous aimed fire of their automatic weapons... His outstanding personal bravery, selfless conduct, complete contempt of the enemy and determination to save the lives of the men of his fire group set an incomparable example and inspired all who saw him.

Finally, Lance Corporal Rambahadur was responsible for killing four more enemy as they attempted to escape...

He displayed heroism, self sacrifice and a devotion to duty and to his men of the very highest order. His actions on this day reached a zenith of determined, premeditated valour which must count amongst the most notable on record and is deserving of the greatest admiration and the highest praise.[1]

Schenck v. U.S. posted:

He's not the only compulsive duelist to appear in the historical record. If you think about it, antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy) is present at varying levels in the population, and if a person has that issue and is born into a level of society where dueling is a means of conflict resolution, he can wind up at an advantage provided he stays lucky. After all, his opponents are just showing up because they have to, whereas he really wants to hurt them. He's not even playing the same sport.

Hazzard posted:

Their knife fighting is interesting, because it's left arm forward, with the assumption your opponent with go for it and probably hit, so you use your right hand, dagger in an ice pick grip to go for their vitals.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Their own drat fault for saxoning and viking up the isles in the first place

Schenck v. U.S. posted:

Talking about formal duels, I've read mostly about late 18th century and onward. I don't think any of this really applies to the kind of situation she is really talking about, because her guys are earlier on, even more concerned about personal honor, and also gambling and drinking heavily on a daily basis.

Anyway, according to what I've read duels are mostly about showing up and demonstrating that you're serious about your personal honor. They were structured events involving the principals, who were the people dueling, and the seconds, who were backing up the principals. The main function of the second was actually to persuade the principal not to have the duel at all, and apparently most aristocratic-type "duels" ended without violence. The seconds would persuade their friends that it wasn't worth dying over. They would show up at the field of combat, demonstrating that they were willing to die over the offense, which in itself was enough to establish their personal honor, and then one or both of the parties would apologize and that was the thing. Other times it would actually proceed to violence, and somebody would take a wound, and then say uncle. This is much the same thing, only with a little more determination to prove your seriousness. Somebody asked about aiming in a duel with pistols: often the objective was not really to hurt the other guy, but to show up and stand bravely when the pistol was fired at you, thus showing that you had honor, nerve, grit, whatever. Usually each person would discharge their weapon without aiming, and they would agree it was fine.

"Barry Lyndon" actually has a great example of this at the end of the film. There's a duel with pistols, and Lyndon's opponent fucks up and wastes his shot. Lyndon has the guy's life in his hands, can do pretty much whatever, and he chooses to fire his own pistol into the wall as a gesture. And then the guy reloads his pistol and shoots Barry Lyndon in the leg... because gently caress him, right?

Grand Prize Winner posted:

What's the difference between the Cornish and the Welsh? Not trying to play a dumbass here: as far as I can tell in distant California it seems they're both celtic cultures that managed to survive the Normans.

e: so welshmen and conrwallers(?) please don't be pissed at mean

OwlFancier posted:

Welsh people live in Wales, Cornish people live in Cornwall?

They're different places, if you're going to lump all the Celts together you're going to be lumping half of Europe together. "Celtic" is applicable to a huge bunch of different cultures across antiquity.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Just different flavors of pants wearing barbarian.

Party Plane Jones posted:

https://twitter.com/ussindymovie/status/898946704543580160

Cyrano4747 posted:

This is true if you're talking about aristocratic dueling but there's a working class version of dueling that operates very much the same way re: honor but is much more focused on inflicting bodily harm. Flip back a few pages and look at what I posted about 17/18th century southern/western "rough and tumble."

HEY GAIL posted:

yeah, i've read an account of an 18th century officer that liked duelling a little too much, and his brother officers end up warning one another about him behind his back because in a society like this it would be very difficult just to confront the guy since then you've blackened his name

quote:

He had seen a good deal of the world before he came out to India, had been a great fox-hunter, a patron of the fancy, and a leading member in the sporting circles. He had many good points about him; was generous and brave; but he had a most inveterate disposition to quizzing, which involved him in many personal encounters, whereby he obtained the reputation of a professed duellist. He used to tell a story of one of his affairs, which, though not at all creditable to himself, was the best satire on the practice of duelling that can well be imagined.

'I was in the theatre one night,' said he, 'and, seeing a fellow eating apples in the box where there were some ladies, I took the liberty of poking one into his throat with my finger. The man struck me. I knocked him down, and gave him a sound drugging' (for the Colonel was a famous bruiser).

'He called me out. I shot him through the arm; and the fool called that satisfaction.' One of the few instances in which he was known to have been right, was on the occasion which proved fatal to him. On receiving his antagonist's shot, which took effect in his body, he staggered a few paces; then, recovering himself, he presented his pistol deliberately at his opponent and said, 'I could kill him' (for he was a capital shot); 'but the last act of my life shall not be an act of revenge!'

-John Blakiston

xthetenth posted:

Lol if you think you have honor worth defending after touching on things as interesting as the difference between 17th century honor and Victoian honor without explaining more.

quote:

According to Dr. Banks, to understand British honor culture, we have to jettison our normal conceptions of right and wrong, since dueling was less about morality and more about displays of social power. We also have to leave behind our modern understanding that what separated the British upper classes from "commoners" was their wealth, social power, and political clout. Gentlemen - as the ruling class called themselves - believed that they were different from the working class not because they had these advantages, but because they had a store of internal honor that most of humanity lacked, which made them unwilling to be subjugated.

quote:

To drive home the point that they were not only socially but physically different, the small group of gentlemen controlling society structured every aspect of English culture to reinforce the message that they were above the common masses. "The way this was done," explains Dr. Banks, "was through the repetition of acts that constantly emphasized that a gentleman was distinctly and qualitatively different." Gentlemen, for instance, always served as officers in the military and were granted certain privileges, such as the ability to take quarters outside of camp and an exemption from physical punishments like flogging.

quote:

Challenges to honor most often came from inside the gentlemanly order. The world of the upper classes was a competitive world, where men jockeyed for position and recognition from authority, leading to strange power relationships. At all times, men tried to uphold their honor and show that they deserved a position amongst society's elite, meaning that disrespect could not be tolerated socially or else they would be seen as lacking the manly strength to resist subjugation, and therefore lose their social capital. In this culture, a disrespectful gesture in itself was cause for a gentleman to defend his honor via pistols - since no one, the logic went, disrespects a man who is considered respectable.

quote:

Throughout the course of Dishonored, the leaders of the Loyalist Conspiracy regard Corvo with a formal friendliness - but they don't treat him with respect. Despite his centrality to the Loyalist plans, Corvo's attic room in the Hound Pits is the worst in the building, both dirtier and in poorer repair than the servant's quarters. Even though he was formally Lord Protector and the Loyalists know the title was unfairly stripped from him, he is the only noble in the conspiracy that everyone - even the servants - refers to by first name. Worse still, they order him around like a servant, sending him out on dangerous missions to do the conspiracy's dirtiest wetwork, that is, when he's not delivering messages or filling whale oil tanks. None of these examples are acceptable treatment of an aristocrat of Corvo's stature, especially one who is part of the Empress's inner circle. But of course, there's the rub: the Empress is dead, and her assassination occurred on Corvo's watch. Though he is entirely innocent of her murder, Corvo is still publicly disgraced by his failure to protect Jessamine, and due to that failure his social status appears to have been downgraded. Under the code of honor he is no longer a gentleman

quote:

The type of fighting that the Loyalists order Corvo to perform precludes him from regaining his status as a gentleman, since his missions force him to further stain his character. According to Dr. Banks, in the 18th and 19th century mind, "Honorable combat is about equal combat."...Regardless of how the player approaches missions in Dishonored, Corvo never fights fair. He stabs people from behind. He snipes guards long-distance. He uses booby traps and magic. Shockingly to an 18th century mind, he rifles through people's private correspondence. In short, the already-disgraced Corvo does all the tasks the blue bloods of the Loyalist Conspiracy are unable to perform because it might sully their reputations.... Corvo isn't interested in respecting his opponents. He's not a gentleman, but a killer crawling through the sewers. "Corvo," says Dr. Banks, "seems to be the exemplar of everything an English man of honor would despise."

quote:

And that's the interesting part, of course, because Corvo isn't English. Or rather, he's not from Gristol like the other members of the conspiracy. Corvo hails from Serkonos, a southern island filled with grapes and dates, with sunny beaches and trade links to the East. Due to the island's description and place names, as well as the name "Corvo" itself - which means "crow" in Italian, and can mean either "crow" or "raven" in Portuguese - Serkonos seems to be Mediterranean in nature, which opens up an exciting line of inquiry in our discussion of honorable combat.

bewbies posted:

So I am almost done with baby's first book about the Crusades.

It seems like in most cases, the Franks tended to get the better of the Muslims in combat on a man-for-man basis: most of the Muslim victories were when the Franks did something dumb and got themselves badly outnumbered, surrounded, cut off from water, or something else silly like that. 1) is this perception accurate, and 2) if it is, why?

HEY GAIL posted:

In short, this reminds me of how bushido got super strict and elaborate once it was no longer relevant to anything in the real world. The honor culture described in this article is elaborate, strict, and overworked--it isn't shared by the people I study, who are killing one another on a regular basis and also trying to stay alive and sane in the middle of the largest war (proportionally) that Europe has ever seen.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Thanks for doing this and for using this specific example. I found the article really interesting (it jumped out at me that the Professor in the article is describing people in some sort of participatory caste system) and then later I read a book on the Samurai and it emphasized how the Bushido code as we know it is a lot like how we think of cowboys today, IE it creates a myth even as the real subject fades away.

AmishSpecialForces posted:

I've been reading Ensign Expendable's blog and came across a common thing regarding Nazi vehicles. They seem to be addicted to renaming poo poo, especially captured gear, over and over and over. The article about the Marder that used captured Soviet guns said it was renamed 10 times. Did other contemporary militaries do this, or was it just another organizational Nazi clusterfuck?

Raenir Salazar posted:

I've been watching some Band of Brother's clips on Youtube, was Sobel as bad as he seemed? Was he at all effective as a instructor?

HEY GAIL posted:

more precisely, when these guys have more time on their hands they can use that time to romanticize their situation and what they thought their situation would have been like in the idealized past. it's also easier to romanticize your life when fewer people are tying to murder you for real. actual samurai were hard af, the people who got really into bushido worked in a loving bank in nineteen ten

edit: when people are actually living according to a code like this, which has grown up organically as part of a culture, it's complicated and flexible, because it's real life and the way you live must respond to the exigencies of your life. when people invent a code for themselves and decide to follow it, it gets artificial-looking like that, in my opinion.

edit 2: something just struck me, which is that written duelling codes existed in the early modern period as well, just somewhat later than my specialty (i think). so part of the difference may be that i am focusing on the way people live rather than on formal codes. it's possible that early modern italy or whatever would look just as strict and ossified if i focused on their written texts, and that 19th century england would look just as complicated and messy if i focused on the daily lives of upper class gentlemen.

Schenck v. U.S. posted:

Do you mean the real-life person, or how he was depicted in the show? In the miniseries, Sobel is clearly a very effective instructor. He drives them hard and they hate him, but they rise to his challenge and develop as soldiers under his instruction. To the extent of preparing the men for action, he is as responsible for their survival and success in combat as any character on the show. At the same time, he's not really competent to command them in the field. He's indecisive, he doesn't understand maneuver, he can't read maps, etc. The show gives the character a lot of credit as an instructor but none as a leader of men.

IRL, I don't know. The miniseries follows Stephen Ambrose's book pretty closely, and that was all based on first-person interviews, after-action reports, and so forth. I did not read the book; I did watch the series; I don't know how factual any of it is. I will point out one thing I definitely noticed the show failing to seriously address: Sobel was Jewish. I can't believe that his background didn't have a significant effect on his relationship with people above and below him in the chain of command, particularly given the elite nature of airborne troops. For example, maybe the soldiers that Ambrose interviewed all said that he was an unlikable martinet, and refused to serve under him, mainly because they resented taking orders from a Jew, and they later found reasons to justify it. It isn't at all implausible, given the default level of antisemitism of American society in the 1940s.

HEY GAIL posted:

edit: when people are actually living according to a code like this, which has grown up organically as part of a culture, it's complicated and flexible, because it's real life and the way you live must respond to the exigencies of your life. when people invent a code for themselves and decide to follow it, it gets artificial-looking like that, in my opinion.

edit 2: something just struck me, which is that written duelling codes existed in the early modern period as well, just somewhat later than my specialty (i think). so part of the difference may be that i am focusing on the way people live rather than on formal codes. it's possible that early modern italy or whatever would look just as strict and ossified if i focused on their written texts, and that 19th century england would look just as complicated and messy if i focused on the daily lives of upper class gentlemen.

Don Gato posted:

It's probably bullshit, but I've heard anecdotes that Gurkha soldiers in WWI had a habit of waiting in their trenches with kukris drawn to gut anyone who got too close instead of popping their heads up to possibly get shot/have to leave the relative safety of the trench. Then again, I've read some of the VC citations that Gurkhas have earned in Afghanistan so I pretty much believe every story involving them.

HEY GAIL posted:

italians love the ice pick grip for some reason

FastestGunAlive posted:

Yo hazzard what is this fight camp and tell us more because that sounded kind of cool

Hazzard posted:

Some interesting facts I learnt. In the 19th century British Army, before some reforms, Officers would use any blade they wanted, as long as it had a regulation hilt. This went as far as one officer attaching a 17th century Spanish Rapier hilt to his saber guard. I'm sure Hey Gal will be simultaneously thrilled and horrified to hear it.

Hazzard posted:

Some interesting facts I learnt. In the 19th century British Army, before some reforms, Officers would use any blade they wanted, as long as it had a regulation hilt. This went as far as one officer attaching a 17th century Spanish Rapier hilt to his saber guard. I'm sure Hey Gal will be simultaneously thrilled and horrified to hear it.